Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and many Republicans think he could have been the next president of the United States, but he will not run, saying his wife and daughters vetoed that choice.

“I will not be a candidate,” Daniels said in a statement given exclusively late Saturday to The Indianapolis Star.

Those words ended 17 months of speculation — and downright begging from anxious Republicans searching for a candidate who can beat President Barack Obama.

But in the end, Daniels said, his decision was simple.

“On matters affecting us all, our family constitution gives a veto to the women’s caucus, and there is no override provision,” Daniels said. “Simply put, I find myself caught between two duties. I love my country; I love my family more.”

Daniels’ decision throws the Republican quest to find a nominee into disarray.

Some candidates — including former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty — have yet to ignite much passion. Others, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., have some passionate followers but haven’t yet shown they can build the national support necessary to win the White House.
And other potential candidates had earlier said no, including Daniels’ close friend Haley Barbour, the Mississippi governor who also cited family concerns.

Daniels had been viewed by many GOP insiders as their best hope, and by many Democrats as a formidable threat. A former political director to President Ronald Reagan and a former budget director to President George W. Bush, he had wide-ranging support among some of the most influential Republican insiders and the ability to raise money. Big money. Fast.
And he had what many in the GOP think is the right message: A call to war against what he dubbed “the red menace” of fiscal debt.

He’ll still push that message, he indicated, but not as a candidate for president.

“I am deeply concerned, for the first time in my life, about the future of our Republic,” Daniels said in his statement.

The nation, he said, must address two questions: “Does the government work for the people or vice versa? And, are we Americans still the kind of people who can successfully govern ourselves, discipline ourselves financially, put the future and our children’s interest ahead of the present and our own?”

It was that message of fiscal discipline that enticed Daniels to even think of entering the presidential race, only two years after he’d promised voters in 2008 that he was making his final run for the only political office he’d ever hold: governor.

Mark Lubbers, a longtime associate and adviser to Daniels, and Indiana Republican Party Chairman Eric Holcomb, who managed the governor’s 2008 re-election campaign, told The Star that in late January 2010, Daniels met in Scottsdale, Ariz., with a group of eight men who had been pushing him not to shut the door on a White House run.

In addition to Lubbers and Holcomb, they included Charlie Black, who was a top campaign adviser to three presidents: Reagan and both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and Al Hubbard, an Indiana businessman who also worked in both Bush administrations.

Daniels had been resistant, telling the group as well as any reporter who asked that he wasn’t running for president.

In Scottsdale, he opened the door.

With, Lubbers said, three conditions.

First, he’d say what he believed, “unconditionally and unconstrained.”

Second, Daniels told the group that “everybody in the room needed to understand he was going to call for a truce on these non-core (social) issues.”

Lastly, “he wanted to make sure that everyone understood that his family was likely to be disinclined. ….. He hadn’t talked to them about it yet, but obviously when you’re a husband and father you know how your kids and your wife feel, and he was sure they would be disinclined to this.”

It wasn’t just the fact that his wife, Cheri, had filed for divorce in 1993. She later married a California physician before divorcing again and remarrying Daniels in 1997.

That already had come under fire, with questions raised about Cheri leaving four young daughters behind in Indiana — something Daniels denied in a separate statement Saturday night.

“The notion that Cheri ever did or would ‘abandon’ her girls or parental duty is the reverse of the truth and absurd to anyone who knows her, as I do, to be the best mother any daughter ever had,” Daniels said.

But, Lubbers said, the family knew that the decision meant their lives would be forever changed, with a loss of privacy and always the fear for their safety.

Despite his initial belief that family concerns would outweigh all other considerations, Daniels began taking steps to explore a bid.

He gave national interviews, including one last June when he told The Weekly Standard, a neoconservative magazine, the next president would have to call a truce on social issues to focus on fiscal concerns. It caused an uproar that threatened to derail his potential candidacy before it even began.

At the same time, though, Daniels’ focus on the nation’s fiscal condition was finding an audience. He was touted by columnists such as George Will and David Brooks as the man the GOP was looking for and the country needed. He won applause at events such as the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, where he said the defeat of the “red menace” of national debt was “the mission of our era.”

And, Lubbers and Holcomb said, he had built up a waiting army of both volunteers and donors.

“There was a gigantic list of people who said they were willing to invest in a presidential campaign that made these points and the vast majority of those people, much to the consternation of the existing candidates in the field, stayed out of those other campaigns,” Lubbers said.

That, he said, “created a dam of money that was waiting for Mitch’s decision.”

Lubbers said Daniels was “genuinely amazed” at the momentum that built behind his campaign — from the big-money people willing to fly to Indianapolis to hear his ideas to the college students who began a movement to draft him as a candidate.

He may have been amazed by one more thing: He discovered he wanted to run.

“All throughout 2010 he was ‘I don’t know if I want to do this or not. I want to advance these issues, but I don’t know if I want to be president,’ ” Lubbers recalled.

After all, as a close adviser to two presidents, he’d seen what the job does to both the men who holds it and their families.

But on Super Bowl Sunday, Lubbers said, “I asked point blank: ‘Do you want to do this?’ And he said yes.”

“Eighty percent of me wants to do this,” Daniels told Lubbers.

It became a joke between them that “if more than 80 percent of you wants to do this, you’re sick.”

Daniels, Lubbers said, “hoped and prayed that the family would have a change of heart.”

In a phone call Saturday to that group of eight who had met with him in Scottsdale, Daniels told them he would not run. They believed he could win — in part because of that social truce that had so infuriated some conservatives but broadened his appeal to independent voters.

The governor’s voice broke only once, Lubbers said, when he spoke of duty to country.

But no one tried to talk him out of the decision.

“You can’t talk somebody out of a decision like this,” Lubbers said.

And both said that despite the emotion, they believed Daniels had no regrets.

“I think it’s fabulously ironic that the candidate criticized by the family values caucus has made a decision based 100 percent on family values,” Lubbers said.

Holcomb called his emotions “bittersweet.”

The nation, he said, will miss a unique talent that blends an ability to connect with voters at the retail level with a wonkish ability to work on detailed policies.

“For his 800-pound brain, he’s got a populist instinct that is just remarkable,” Lubbers said.

There is, still, a chance that the public will find out.

Daniels said nothing, in either the statement he gave The Star or in his phone call with his friends, about whether he also was ruling out accepting the vice presidential nomination or any other job in a future Republican administration.

“I’m sure he would not answer,” Lubbers said. “I’m sure he would call it a ridiculous hypothetical, though I’m sure it’s going to be the first thing everybody asks.”

But Daniels clearly will be trying to push the GOP candidates to take up the fiscal mantle. He’ll do so this week, when he joins former President Bill Clinton and Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., on Wednesday at a Washington forum on finding bipartisan solutions to the nation’s long-term debt. And he’ll do so this fall, when goes on a tour to promote his book on that issue.

Holcomb said he is “optimistic” that another GOP candidate will take on this message, and win with it.

“I hope people realize why so many people were drawn to Mitch Daniels,” Holcomb said, “and take note of his courage and willingness to speak plainly about the real problems our country faces.”